On Friday I’ve delivered a talk about the Data Vision for 2015, about the objectives of the database developers for the year. To be honest, I was freaking out, and almost nobody realized I was. When I asked some people after the talk “how was it”, the people would respond “great as usual”, and practically nobody realized it was actually unusual, because I never ever spoke on such a topic before.

It seems pretty easy – I know exactly what I consider the most important goals for the database development. Whenever I talk to the other database developers, or to my director, or to my squad members – I am saying something to the effect “I really wish we could always to “this”! I want “that” to be done each time we deploy new code!” But when you have 45 minutes and a hundred people listening, somehow you become mute…

Overall I think it all went well. One of the most important thing which I hope had reached the audience was, that the database development should be tightly integrated with the application development. Where exactly is the borderline, depends solely on the efficiency of the solution provided, not on any presumptions of “how it should be done”. And in order to achieve it, we should be able to speak each other’s language.

A database developer should be able to read the application code, which invokes the function (s)he wrote, and to understand, how it will be used. Sometimes we, the database developers, really do not realize, what exactly causes the problems, and we think that the application developers are just difficult and do not understand there benefits. On the other hand, the application developers tend to react nervously, when “the parts of business logic” are disappearing in “this long SQL code”, while they are absolutely capable to read this code and understand what’s going on.

So, one of my biggest goals for this year is to make our development process really integrated. And really flexible. In all possible meanings 🙂